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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 2 Hansard (9 March) . . Page.. 452 ..

MS TUCKER

One issue I am concerned about is the change of funding to community organisations from grants to payments for specific services, when often this type of funding is not appropriate to the main functions of the organisation. A recent example of this is the Conservation Council of the South-East Region and Canberra, which has received government funding since self-government. The Government uses the council as a conduit for interaction with the community on environmental matters, and it is called upon regularly by the Department of Urban Services to comment - actually, more regularly than used to be the case, because we are losing expertise within the bureaucracy, due to the cuts that the Government has made to policy areas in these critical areas. Government is actually becoming much more reliant on the expertise in the community sector. So the requirement for them to be reasonably resourced is even greater to ensure good outcomes for the ACT community.

I have noticed on a couple of occasions when draft documents have gone out that it is the expertise in the community that has actually brought to the notice of the Government quite significant flaws in those documents that were not picked up within the bureaucracy. But what is happening to the Conservation Council now is that it is being told by government that it cannot receive general funding but must apply for funding for specific projects. How can you divide the provision of advice to government into specific projects? This story is repeated in a number of community groups. If the Government wants this assistance and is becoming more reliant on it, it needs to acknowledge that and be prepared to pay for it.

Community services also are not necessarily benefiting from the introduction of the purchaser-provider model, and the question is whether or not you can put services which are complicated into the output model, where we are so convinced that we have to be able to quantify everything into the output model, which cannot necessarily describe the quality of the service that is being provided. I recall that quite early in my time here I asked the Auditor-General whether there had ever been a cost-benefit analysis done of the whole purchaser-provider model. He said that there had not been and conceded that it could be a useful thing to do, because there are obviously huge costs implicit in the model if you are going to ensure that the quality of services is not going to be undermined by this very business-like structure. For example, you have to actually know how to specify services properly in contracts. Contracts have to be made. The whole process has to be very accountable. We have seen some quite interesting examples quite recently of where that has not happened.

Whilst the Greens believe that some areas of government expenditure need to be protected, there are some where we think cuts could be justified and the affected part of the community could take up more of the costs. The provision of facilities for competitive sport is one area where we believe that the sporting clubs should be paying more, on the principle of user pays. I think that expenditure by the Government on facilities for particular sports is of interest only to the participants of that sport and is of dubious broader public interest. Government expenditure should really be focused on the broader public interest. There is also the point that sporting clubs already raise considerable revenue through poker machines; so it is not as if these clubs are starved of funds.

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